Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt
semianalysis.substack.com
semianalysis.substack.com
Seems very shocking, a recent turn-over of about 100 engineers. I’m gonna assume these were all related to the CPU architecture teams.
Makes one wonder why these people left. Did they feel it was too hard to make progress with ARM? Was pay bad and didn’t Apple want to increase compensation? Perhaps a bad work/life balance?
What was interesting is that Apple was recently looking for a RISC V engineer in a job posting and who knows … perhaps looking for multiple. Would Apple be looking to change architecture to RISC V in the future? Maybe Apple is also worried by a possible acquisition of ARM by Nvidea of course.
A frustrating feature of large silicon valley companies is that if you leave the company and come back later you will typically have better compensation than if you had stayed.
I could also imagine that the M1 team felt they weren't adequately rewarded after hitting a huge home run.
Moreover, it's probably the best time to switch jobs, because their market value is highest and at Apple they would just be expected to repeat the same success every year. Not to mention the benefit of gaining equity in a new "startup" which is almost immediately acquired at high valuation.
That’s just not true, especially with stock appreciation. Unless they were grossly underpaid. It might be the case for some L3-L4 but not senior engineers.
I got my 30% raises per hop by hopping OUT of a company and then back in. Raises were only 3%-8% staying inside.
Unfortunately, that's true of almost all large companies. It's one of the dumbest polices out there, but virtually every big corporation does it.
Maybe I will be a retread one day but the other practices the company does leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.
Yes, you know what is more shocking? It is BS.
I mean like for Pete sake, there were more ex Qualcomm / Intel / ARM Engineers ex Apple inside Nuvia. And many from Samsung, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia.
It would be good to ban them, totally, nationally: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/biden-issues-executive-...
> These are performance gains are generally paltry despite a huge increase from 11.8B transistors to 15B.
But all of those billions went into the Neural Engine. Look, Google is doing the same thing with Tensor SoC. Shoving more neural nets into the computational photography pipeline is priority number one for the smartphone giants because better camera systems are what likely drives a lot of new smartphone sales.
They're reaching a point of seriously competing with entry level DSLR and mirrorless offerings for beginner filmmakers.
I believe Apple has delayed new architecture for CPU simply because the actual one is powerful enough and they (correctly) want to take advantage of it in terms of large scale (and due to chip shortage/fabs sufferer).
The new iPhone 13 Pro is very interesting but one thing leave me “meh”: the weight! Again has increased from the already quite heavy 12 Pro:
iPhone 12 Pro: 189 grams / iPhone 13 Pro: 204 grams
Not much but I’m sure we will feel the difference, like from 12 to 12 pro.
I hope Apple will introduce a better codec for Bluetooth, way behind the actual AAC 256. But not the cable again…
Say you get a loaner car and you want to listen to music from your phone. You can either connect a 3.5 mm to 3.5 mm cable between your phone and the car and start playback, or you can go into the car settings, start bluetooth pairing, wait for the device to be found, pair the devices, make sure that your address book is not shared via Bluetooth and stored in the car's memory and then start playback (and probably remove the pairing from both ends at the end of it all).
I don’t think you’ll see an improvement before next year.
The noise cancelling is nice, but I can live without it. For the record I have never dropped my phone due to the headphone jack.
If you lose your headphones is your problem, not Apple :-) what would absolutely be implemented is a better codec for hi res BT Audio but also if there is a jack I prefer to override the internet DAC with digital exit.
I lose my headphones often enough for it to be a problem, had they been $300+ (which they are, in sweden).
Me losing my head phones becomes apples problem, since other manufacturers give me better options. I want an iphone, but this shit about being "brave" and removing the 3.5mm jack makes me vomit a little in my mouth.
My colleagues that bought the airpods pro have started having battery life issues now. Changing the batteries at an apple store costs an eye-watering ~1000kr.
That is completely bollocks.
(Its extremely fast and powerful compared to an M1, at cost of greater power consumption of course.)
Who knows if they'll call it M2 or M1X.
The really interesting question is whether Apple can meet their No-More-Intel timeline. I'd bet they don't quite make it in time.
Presumably it's not ARMv9, since they didn't announce new silicon features.
(I'd argue that one links to the "source" article, based on the domain)